Recently, a variety of application software (hereinafter, referred to as “application”) operating on an information device, with a focus on a personal computer (hereinafter, referred to as “PC”), has been sold. The selling tool has gradually changed from technique of selling an application stored as package software in a recording medium, such as a CD-ROM, to technique of allowing an application to be downloaded for free through a network, such as Internet, due to superiority in terms of distribution costs and version management, and selling a license key code (hereinafter, referred to as “license”) for starting the application.
Also, since licenses are sold based on function units of an application, instead of validating all functions of the application as one license, the license of the basic function is provided at low cost, so that initial introduction costs are maximally reduced. Therefore, many users are allowed to purchase and use the license. By gradually allowing the users to separately purchase individual licenses of additional functions, selling techniques of raising the lowest level of total sales have been actively carried out.
Alternatively, a company user may utilize a usage method in which a plurality of licenses are purchased in batch and registered in a server, and a license is obtained from the server when the application or function is used in an information device of an application user among employees of an office.
An example of such a technique is disclosed in Patent Literature 1. The technique disclosed in Patent Literature 1 is directed to easily realize license management of various kinds of software products which are used by a plurality of employees of a customer company. Specifically, the management is performed by providing an agent and a management center. The agent is provided at each user terminal of a customer and enables the software product to be used on a user terminal, in which the software product is installed, by starting the software product based on a unique license key. The management center manages the number of issued licenses of the corresponding customer in response to a key issue request from the customer's user terminal, creates a license key unique to the user terminal, and returns and keeps the license key.